Published: 02/12/2021
ISBN: 9781783787463
Granta Books
256 pages

Stet

Diana Athill

For nearly 50 years, Diana Athill edited (and nursed and coerced and coaxed) some of the most celebrated writers in the English language. In a prose style of inimitable wit and rare candour, she recounts tales from a long life in publishing, including her reflections on editing writers such as V. S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys, Gitta Sereny and Brian Moore. She also provides an account of her own writing career, which includes the two critically acclaimed works, Instead of a Letter and After a Funeral.

Stet is unlike any other memoir I know, and a joy to read from start to finish

Independent on Sunday

She is always eloquent, often very funny, a natural writer

Sunday Telegraph

A narrative in which the passing literary stars take second place to an extraordinary guiding intelligence - sceptical, amused, humane

New Statesman

The Author

Diana Athill was born in 1917. She helped André Deutsch establish the publishing company that bore his name and worked as an editor for Deutsch for four decades. Athill’s distinguished career as an editor is the subject of her acclaimed memoir Stet. She is the author of seven further volumes of memoirs, Instead of a Letter, After a Funeral, Yesterday Morning, Make Believe, Somewhere Towards the End, Alive, Alive Oh!, A Florence Diary, and a collection of letters, Instead of a Book, all published by Granta. Her only novel, Don’t Look At Me Like That, was first published in 1967. In January 2009, she won the Costa Biography Award for Somewhere Towards the End, and was presented with an OBE. She died in January 2019.